Online Travel Booking and Bidding Agencies - When is it best to buy a ticket?

Myself and two others are traveling to Aruba August 4th until the 11th. A month ago the tickets were around 550 per ticket. Well I just check recently and now they are 845 a ticket. I dont understand how they can jump up that much. Do you think that the price will go down? Also, when is the best time to buy a ticket?

Welcome to Flyertalk HeidiWallace09.

The MilesBuzz forum is for the discussion of the "latest frequent flyer program buzz". I'm going to move this post to the "Online travel booking and bidding" forum where you can continue to follow it.

Regards,
Flipside

I'll tell you how: Because United canceled a bunch of their flights. They used to fly to Aruba 3 days a week, and now they only fly there 1 day a week.

I was scheduled to go to Aruba in early May, using Mileage Plus miles, on a mid-week flight both ways. UA canceled all of their mid-week flights, and told me that there were no award flights left on the remaining Saturday flight. So, basically, they canceled my trip by canceling their flights.

Fortunately, I was able to use the refunded miles to book a trip to Hawaii instead, and I hadn't made any non-cancellable hotel plans.

If you're looking for reasonableness or even logic in the setting of fares, don't bother ... you'll drive yourself nuts.

Airlines can -- and do -- charge whatever they believe the market will tolerate, and they can change their fares at will. Rates fluctuate with on-route competition, fuel costs, whoever at the carrier's Passenger Pricing department believes they can get away with the fare hike, etc, etc. A good hint that rates are going up is when carriers stop serving the destination as frequently as they used to, and vice-versa.

Some will argue this next point I'm about to make, but the price leveling of passenger air fares is almost always purely supply-and-demand driven relative to the date of travel. Hence you usually (but not always) get the best rates the farther in advance you buy.

To answer your original question, Heidi, there is no single "best" time. I always suggest shopping just as soon as you think you might want to fly someplace, and nail down the best deal you can just as soon as that suspicion turns to fact. Once you have a paid ticket in your hand, you have the only guarantee of price stability possible.